If we really want to escape
the grip of human rights law-we must quit the EU.
Daily Mail
Monday, May 15,2006.
THE
Melanie
Phillips
Column
Once again, the Prime Minister is trying to surf a wave of
popular outrage by announcing he will take action - which on closer examination
proves to be mere froth - not least because his own policy lies at the very
heart of the problem.
Thus Tony Blair has spoken
out against ‘an abuse of common sense’
In
the way the human rights law has been used to allow nine Afghan hijackers to
remain in Britain, or free a rapist from prison only for him to commit MURDER.
BUT
it is his own human rights law, which has quite simply altered the entire legal
and moral culture of this country, and taken an axe to
COMMON
SENSE
The
Judge in last week’s Afghan ruling has been roundly pilloried. BUT common sense
in this case was trounced in
2004
-when an immigration tribunal
ruled on human rights grounds that it was too dangerous to send the hijackers
back to Afghanistan
-
even
though the Taliban, from whom they fled, had been replaced by a Western-backed
government.
The
root of the problem here is not the wretched judge BUT the Government itself,
which dragged its feet over the case for years. This was because it was
paralysed by the fact that
HUMAN
RIGHTS LAW
-described
only last week by the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, as the Government’s
‘greatest achievement’ -has created a culture of legalised lunacy.
Disruptive.
Detectives
across the country are refusing to issue ‘wanted’ posters for missing foreign
criminals because they say they do not want to breach their right to privacy,
and risk lawsuits by releasing their names and photographs.
The
Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency routinely shreds the driving records of
speeding and drunken drivers because bureaucrats are afraid of human rights
law. That means thousands of drivers
with a bad history escape with lighter punishments because Courts cannot learn
the full truth about their past.
It
is no use saying that such judgments misread human rights law since, because
such law consists of a balancing act between competing ‘rights’ requiring the
Courts to arbitrate between them, no one can be sure how any disruptive cases
will end up.
The
fact is that ruling after human rights ruling has turned right and wrong on
their heads and radically undermined the covenant of responsibility between the
INDIVIDUAL and the STATE.
To
take an egregious example, human rights law has DESTROYED this country’s
ability to CONTROL its OWN BORDERS.
The
Courts have used the ‘human right’ to family life to reward
ILLEGAL
IMMIGRATION.
Their
absurdly generalised interpretation of the prohibition against torture - which
wrenched this principle out of ALL recognition - has made it all but impossible
to deport those foreigners who threaten this country’s security.
The
LAW LORDS’ perverse reading of ‘DISCRIMINATION’ last year has meant that such
suspects can’t even be locked up pending removal from this country.
WHAT
KIND OF HUMAN RIGHTS ARE THESE,
-which
actually force a country to destroy its own security along with its principles
of
CITIZENSHIP
FAIRNESS
And
OBLIGATION?
At
the weekend, Mr Blair said he was considering fresh legislation to
prevent future Court rulings from ‘overruling the Government’. here lie the first clues to the fact that
these are likely to be empty words.
FIRST, He’s only considering any
change.
SECOND, human rights law doesn’t
give the COURTS the POWER to overrule the GOVERNMENT.
All
they can do is declare legislation incompatible with human rights law, thus
putting pressure on MINSTERS. So Mr Blair has given us a straw man, which he
promises he will knock down.
Then
look at the way in which Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer [Blair’s old flat-mate], has been twisting and
turning. There might need to be legislation, he said, to ensure that human
rights law would have no effect on
PUBLIC
SAFETY ISSUES.
PARALYSED
BUT
the whole point of human rights law is that it is supposed to be an overarching
set of principles. So it CAN’T and CHANGED.
And
in any case, what kind of overarching principles are these which in the Lord
Chancellor’s opinion, actually imperil
PUBLIC
SAFETY.
Lord
Falconer appears to be saying that it’s not human rights law that’s at fault,
but certain officials who are misunderstanding it. This is completely and
lamentably to miss the point.
It’s
not merely that this law has paralysed public bodies such as the police and the
intelligence service, which say they can barely move for fear of falling foul
of it.
More
fundamentally still, human rights law has driven
JUSTICE
MORALITY
And
SOCIAL
ORDER
-off
the rails altogether.
It
has acted as a grievance charter fuelling the ‘victim culture’ in
which all minorities are seen as incapable of being held responsible for their
actions.
As
such, it has become a principle weapon against the
CULTURE
and IDENTITY of the NATION.
-
and
by transferring power to the JUDGES, has delivered a powerful blow against
DEMOCRACY.
Abolishing
the HUMAN RIGHTS ACT would certainly help put a brake on that process. BUT the
problem would remain that Britain is signed up to the
European
Convention on Human Rights,
-
which
would still have supremacy over our laws.
Look
for example at the Chahal judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, the
key ruling preventing Britain deporting foreign undesirables.
This
held that, if a person faced torture or inhuman treatment abroad, the risk to
that individual from deporting him could not even be balanced against the risk
he might pose to the country, which allowed him to stay.
IN
other words, this ruling was a specific attack on the right of the country to
decide what was in its citizens’ own best interests either to derogate from
bits of this CONVENTION - as every other signatory BUT Britain has in fact done
- or leave altogether.
Undemocratic.
Yesterday,
Lord Falconer gave the game away when he acknowledged that- although the Human
Rights Convention has separate origins from the European Union - no country can
be a member of the EU unless he is also a CONVENTION signatory.
TO
SOME OF US, OF COURSE, that is precisely WHY we should leave the EU, in order
to
RESTORE
-OUR
POWERS
of
SELF-GOVERNMENT
And
DEMOCRACY
But
the fact that we are the Human rights prisoner of the EU is why this GOVERNMENT
will never address the deformities of human rights law.
The
usual suspects scream that it would be unthinkable to abolish ‘human rights’.
How absurd. Real human rights are very different. Indeed, before ‘human rights’
law took hold we were rather
MORE FREE,
-not less.
INSTEAD,
we would be abolishing the arbitrary and undemocratic power of the JUDGES to
impose upon us a particular agenda [which is un-English] -far from universal.
In
the remarkable words last year of the senior Law Lord, Lord Bingham, human
rights law existed to protect vulnerable minorities - who are sometimes
disliked, resented or despised -against the howls of ‘majority opinion’.
It
would seem to follow that - for the JUDICIARY - Afghan hijackers, murders and
other criminals are vulnerable minorities’, while the [Peace-loving majority] who are their potential
victims have NO HUMAN RIGHTS at all.
Extricating
OUR NATION from this MESS would undoubtedly be complicated and difficult. BUT
UNLESS WE DO SO, we are unlikely much longer to have a NATION worthy of the
NAME.
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